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The Death of Expertise
- The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
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Well worth a listen, good info and some flaws
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Publisher's summary
People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues.
Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols shows this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including the openness of the Internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine.
Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement.
Nichols notes that when ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy - or in the worst case, a combination of both.
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With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation’s most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals he again addresses the challenge of improving the world, but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?
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Interesting, but not science
- By Lloyd Fassett on 03-14-16
By: Adam Grant, and others
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The War Against Boys
- How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men
- By: Christina Hoff Sommers
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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An updated and revised edition of the controversial classic - now more relevant than ever - argues that boys are the ones languishing socially and academically, resulting in staggering social and economic costs. After two major waves of feminism and decades of policy reform, women have made massive strides in education. Today they outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic, and vocational well-being. Christina Hoff Sommers contends that it's time to take a hard look at present-day realities and recognize that boys need help.
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Important Book
- By ProfiPad on 11-05-18
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Weapons of Mass Instruction
- A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
- By: John Taylor Gatto
- Narrated by: Michael Puttonen
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of traditional education which cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a byproduct of rote-memorization drills. Gatto's earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, introduced the now-famous expression of the title into the common vernacular. Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another chilling metaphor to the brief against conventional schooling.
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I will never see school the same
- By Nicole on 05-21-15
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Arrogance
- Rescuing America from the Media Elite
- By: Bernard Goldberg
- Narrated by: Bernard Goldberg
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Abridged
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In his #1 New York Times best seller, Bias, Emmy Award-winning journalist Bernard Goldberg created a national firestorm when he exposed the liberal biases of the so-called mainstream media. Now, in his new blockbuster, Goldberg goes even further. He not only takes on Big Journalism, but offers a twelve-step program to help the media elites overcome their addiction to bias.
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wow
- By Douglas on 11-11-03
By: Bernard Goldberg
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The Death of Truth
- Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
- By: Michiko Kakutani
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
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Performance
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We live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked and discounted by the occupants of the White House. Discredited conspiracy theories and ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, and Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases.
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Prescient Account of the Mechanics of Tyranny
- By Brian Price on 07-27-18
By: Michiko Kakutani
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The Myth of the Rational Voter
- Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
- By: Bryan Caplan
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
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The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book.
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Refreshing
- By Lyle Wincentsen on 05-12-11
By: Bryan Caplan
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The Science of Fear
- Why We Fear the Things We Should Not - and Put Ourselves in Great Danger
- By: Daniel Gardner
- Narrated by: Scott Peterson
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
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From terror attacks to the War on Terror, bursting real-estate bubbles to crystal meth epidemics, sexual predators to poisonous toys from China, our list of fears seems to be exploding. And yet, we are the safest and healthiest humans in history. Irrational fear is running amok, and often with tragic results. In the months after 9/11, when people decided to drive instead of fly - believing they were avoiding risk - road deaths rose by 1,595. Those lives were lost to fear.
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A rational assessment of the world we live in
- By Kristopher on 08-29-09
By: Daniel Gardner
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Excellent Sheep
- The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
- By: William Deresiewicz
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
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Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale's admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways.
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skip the book read the essay
- By Amazon Customer on 05-07-15
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Future Babble
- Why Expert Predictions Fail - and Why We Believe Them Anyway
- By: Dan Gardner
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In Future Babble, award-winning journalist Dan Gardner presents landmark research debunking the whole expert prediction industry and explores our obsession with the future. The truth is that experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys.
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Future Babble Babble
- By Karen on 05-04-11
By: Dan Gardner
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American Sketches
- Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Cotter Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.
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Not Really Sketches
- By DAVID on 11-04-11
By: Walter Isaacson
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The War on the West
- By: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Douglas Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
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Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
By: Douglas Murray
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A politicallly motivated partisan diatribe!
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Ruined by obvious bias
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A politicallly motivated partisan diatribe!
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The Ghost in The Scientific Machinery
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In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel 18th-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” - our social system for turning disagreement into truth. By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do - and how they can do it.
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"Climate change is a hoax - and so is coronavirus." "Vaccines are bad for you." These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. They are not merely uninformed - they are misinformed. They cite cherry-picked evidence, rely on fake experts, and believe conspiracy theories. How can we get them to change their minds and accept the facts when they don't believe in facts? In this book, Lee McIntyre shows that anyone can fight back against science deniers, and argues that it's important to do so. Science denial can kill.
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Well worth a listen, good info and some flaws
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INSIGHTFUL
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Propaganda and Persuasion gives you a one-of-a-kind opportunity to explore the powerful, fascinating, and at times dangerous world of influence. Taught by Professor Dannagal G. Young of the University of Delaware, these 12 eye-opening lectures arm you with the tools of effective communication and the insight to understand—and perhaps resist—persuasion in all its forms.
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Honest introspection required
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Shallow insights with a strong Leftist Bias
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What listeners say about The Death of Expertise
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- iKlick
- 09-10-17
Disappointing
Any additional comments?
Seeing the other reviews, I realize I am in a very small minority in stating that overall, I was disappointed in this audio book. I had read some good (though brief) reviews, but the book seemed to meander and deviate from what its title indicated the subject would be. I thought too much time was spent discussing the failings of colleges and universities. The Introduction and Conclusion parts of the book were good, as was the chapter on “The ‘New’ New Journalism.” I did like the author’s writing, and his use of words and conveying his thoughts were well done. However, the substance of what he said was often unimpressive, and I was somewhat put off by the author’s occasional flashes of a fondness for elitism (though he was referring to “good elitism” rather than the “bad elitism” as is typically viewed for an egalitarian society).
If the audio book had been condensed to 90 minutes from its over 8-hour length, hitting the high points, it would have been a worthwhile listen for me, since the author did have some good observations. What helped me finish the audio book was the superb reading by Sean Pratt. He was one of the best narrators to whom I have listened.
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27 people found this helpful
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- Tom from Pittsburgh
- 02-03-18
There couldn't be a better book at this time.
I learned of Tom Nichols when I first started using Twitter last year. He was funny, sharply critical of foolishness, and to my surprise, an avowed conservative. What struck me most about his tweets, and profoundly moved me in his book, is his well-reasoned insistence that we the people, who have so much to lose by living a life of indifference or studied ignorance, have access to resources that can address and often solve our greatest problems. We need only listen, carefully but critically, to those with expertise. He does not espouse blind allegiance to a greater education or heap disdain on those whose expertise is born of painful errors or years of tedious, mindane work. It is well-balanced book that simply requests that we be responsible for our own lives, and respect the skills and experience of those whose specialized knowledge can help us as individuals and as a society.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Austin Craig
- 12-12-18
The Opposite of What I Expected
I expected a book on why the effectiveness of “expertise” is dwindling. Instead I was bombarded by pseudo-intellectual groupthink on why the public is stupid, academics are experts and we should submit to their expertise blindly.
While the majority of academia strays further and further from rigorous critiquing and closer to groupthinking echo chambers, the author in essence asks ‘why doesn’t the average person follow the guidance of the ivory tower?’ If an expert is not accountable to the public/reality, and is only accountable to his peers, books like this are published.
Education (especially among the humanities, history, social sciences) is decentralizing and well-meaning but misguided “Experts” wonder why the public doesn’t think they have all the answers.
Production was fine, the author had a fine speaking voice. Otherwise avoid unless you’re looking to fluff your confirmation bias on the value of anointed experts.
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13 people found this helpful
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- aaron
- 06-19-17
Buy a Copy for your Congressman!!
This is probably one of the most important books to be written in the last decade. And yet, the people that SHOULD read it, NEVER WILL!!!
And such is the conundrum we are in as a society. The idiots that think that science and facts should be spelled "science" and "facts", complete with smug little air quotes and all, will NEVER, EVER read this book. And why would they? It would utterly destroy their precious little fantasy world, where their opinion on particle physics is just as good as the particle physicist, or, much more disturbingly, that their lone opinion on climate change is equally as accurate as a consensus of climate change scientists.
It disgusts me that this book even needed to be written, but thank the Greek Gods that it was!! This is a truly revolutionary read, and in a perfect society it would be mandatory reading for all politicians and children.
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- Anon
- 09-06-20
Meh - not terribly insightful
Pretty much boilerplate material on expertise and the USA’s reception to it. Also does not challenge the experts as much as I think is appropriate (but does do so a bit). Nasim Taleb has a much more interesting and opposing take on expertise. This book does offer a bit of interesting material when it gets into critiquing academia. Overall doesn’t provide much more beyond saying “these people need to recognize we’re right”.
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- katherine
- 12-31-17
An extremely important book for our time
This book is more important than ever! It covers how expertise is dying at the hands of too much information and the laziness of the average American to get the real facts. The author covers the domains of higher education, journalism, politics, and our democracy as a whole and discusses how people's need for quick snippets rather than delving deeper is costing us a great deal. A scary tome for our future, but understanding the problem is the first step to fixing it. READ THIS BOOK!!
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- SHARPER
- 02-16-21
Interesting but not compelling
I thought the Future of Professions was better at explaining what Mr. Nichols complains about. I tried to separate his anecdotes about [snowflake] students correcting professors from actual data on the relationships between students and professors. I think I missed the scientific data he used to prove some of his points. I found myself waiting for the evidence after a story about how more people are being influenced by non-experts than by experts or how it actually matters. He uses social media as the prominent examples, but as he pointed out this is availability heuristic and not actual statistics at work. I think he missed the centuries of mass miss information propagated by the Church or other mythology based religions. People want to believe in something and they will - town idiots will have their platform and some will listen: maybe even the majority of people. The author would like to believe idiots are winning - I am waiting for the evidence - in a lot of cases the idiots have always been in charge (e.g. organized religion or deity based civilizations)
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- David DiMatteo
- 01-02-21
A Lot of Complaining...not much expertise.
I feel like most of what the author writes about here resonates with me. Unfortunately however, the book provides little quantitative evidence that any of it is really true or actually poses any real large scale problem for America or anywhere else. Ultimately the book failed to convince me that an overall “death of expertise” has occurred or is occurring now. The author posits no data to suggest that the overwhelming majority of people are not trusting experts like their doctors, attorneys, financial advisors, auto mechanics, etc regularly. Moreover the anecdotal evidence the author posits is exceedingly limited. He cites examples of small groups who have rejected the consensus of experts on certain finite issues (anti-vaxers, raw milk consumers) and otherwise laments poor political decisions (the vote for Brexit, the election of Trump) without much analysis as to how these limited decisions constitute a more general rejection of expertise. The overall effect is that the tone of the book comes off as the ranting of an old arrogant college professor who is upset that these kids today don’t give him and his ilk the proper respect their credentials should command. I fear Sean Pratt’s narration only exacerbates this effect. But, this should not be held against Pratt. He’s a great narrator who I liked on many other books. Probably the wrong choice for this one. In summary, I feel like the author here should have taken some of his own advice and stayed in his own lane—Russia and Soviet politics. He just doesn’t have the background nor the data to make a compelling argument here despite the distinct intuitive appeal of many of his points.
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- ChristopherWiltsie
- 10-09-20
Okay Boomer
It's a book about how we shouldn't speak on or criticize subjects we arent knowledgeable or expert in by a guy who is not an expert on most of the subjects he is writing about.
Also made me feel like saying "okay boomer" regularly.
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- Sideways Shrink
- 01-26-18
Nichols appears to lacks awareness of his own position in his argument
Nichols fails to acknowledge that he is from the generation that got inexpensive bachelors degrees and could still get tenure. I got my BA in Political Science and Philosophy at Reed College in 1990 (full scholarships due to financial need—-gotta mix in some poor kids for diversity). Then I went to a PhD program at Johns Hopkins. One and 1/2 years into my second year rumors of hiring freezes and “the death of tenure” were circulating furiously so I looked into the demographics of the situation. My advisor, under pressure leveled with me. So I took the perfunctory Masters and let go of the dream of teaching and living immersed in a public and academic dialogue about civic political discourse. My heart was broken. You can write me off as having quit my graduate program for another reason and that I’m really just stupid. I am a psychiatrist now and I love my work. All of this cocksure certainty of the boomers is going to fall squarely on my Gen-X and the millennials as we struggle to pay for their platinum social security and Medicare which the CBO has determined which both be bankrupt in 2034. What will the Boomers have left behind? Better infrastructure? No. A vigorous, well funded university system? No. Nichols is the cat that swallowed the canary and is now asking the canaries why they aren’t better behaved (that is a problem) and continually reminding the canaries that we aren’t equal to him. No, we aren’t because we weren’t all born at 3rd base sliding into home thinking what losers all those people back in the locker room who are still trying to figure out the code to the locker. Although the author Cannon Gibney used the word instantiate way too many times, I recommend his book The Sociopathic Generation: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. Lastly, Nichols writing style implies that he thinks his readers are stupid. I had high hopes for the book. It’s funny that he mentions the Dunning-Krueger effect because I think he suffers from it. Otherwise, if you’re going to talk down to your reader from his Trumpian “I’m a really really really smart guy” perch you shouldn’t tip your hand quite so obviously. I’m just not that impressed. All of my Reed professors’ books were better than this.
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